This song…I just can’t get away from it. It haunts my thoughts and pierces my conscience. Here’s the line that was after me today: Oh Lord we cast down our idols… It got me thinking about idols. I think sometimes we think of idols as just things we are worshipping: career, romance, money, etc… But I think idols are more than that. Idols are anything we can’t cast down in the name of Jesus. Things like: worry, fear, anger, gluttony. Lately my biggest idol is righteous indignation. I have at least three situations in my life right now where I have been wronged. I have been sinned against… quite obviously sinned against. In these situations, anger is a logical response. Feeling pain over being hurt is logical as well. But hanging on to my indignation, struggling to let go of the hurt and pain because I feel righteously angry that these things happened, well that is not right. Then I’ve made that thing an idol. I’ve elevated it to a status where it is exempt from being cast down before God, and that my friend should signal some serious warning bells!
Guess what? Today on my way home from the dentist, it did! All of a sudden my heart felt as if it had been punched. I started crying: Oh Lord we cast down our idols…. Over and over again…. Oh Lord we cast down our idols…. Oh Lord we cast down our idols…. I replayed that part of the track so many times my children were begging for mercy. The hard part is that knowing we have an idol and wanting to cast it down before God is only the beginning. Satan doesn’t want us to cast down our idols. Satan doesn’t want us to bow our hearts… bend our knees… Satan does NOT want us to be humble. He wants us to pridefully cling to those things we are idolizing. So he is going to throw a lot of fiery darts our way. He will remind us of that idol. He will taunt us with that idol. He will torment us with that idol. It will be gut wrenching and grueling to get that thing out of us.
Think of a wisdom tooth whose roots are crooked and twisted and even wrapped TIGHTLY around each other and fused with the bone. A dentist will need all his strength and all his dental knowledge to get that thing extracted. That’s what we have to do with our idols. We have to muster all our strength to root out that worry. We have to gather all our spiritual knowledge to extricate that fear. We have to work hard to extinguish that righteous indignation. I believe that God will help us in this endeavor; however, I also believe when we give power to something evil, when we allow an idol to have center stage in our hearts, then we are going to have to combine some good old fashioned elbow grease with God’s grace in order to cast that bad boy DOWN!
So whatever your idol is today, why don't you try to cast it down? I know I'm going to. It won’t be easy. We'll need to be strong. We will need God’s grace and all our strength and every bit of spiritual wisdom we have ever gained, but close your eyes with me and sing these words with ALL your heart:
We bow our hearts
We bend our knees
Oh Spirit come make us humble
We turn our eyes
From evil things
Oh Lord we cast down our idols
No comments:
Post a Comment